Managing users one by one is impossible at scale. If you have 500 (or 5,000) employees, you cannot manually assign permissions, invite them to pages individually, or target your messaging effectively.

Groups are your solution to this. They act as "containers" for your users, allowing you to manage permissions, content, and targeting for hundreds of people with a single click. Unsure about how to organize your employees into groups? Check out our recommended strategy in Best practices for segmenting your users into groups.

You don't need to build your groups manually. You can automatically synchronize groups from your existing user directory (like Entra ID).

Key benefits of using groups

 Permission Management (Roles)

Instead of assigning a role (like "Editor" or "Admin") to users individually, you can assign a role to a group.

If you have an "Internal Comms Team" group, you can give that entire group permission to create content in the Studio. When a new hire joins and is added to that group, they automatically inherit those permissions. No manual setup required.

 Audience Building (Pages, Communities & Events)

Groups make it effortless to populate your intranet's spaces.

• Pages: You can auto-subscribe a group to a specific page. For example, you can ensure every user in the "Location: New York" group is automatically subscribed to the "Office: New York" page.
• Communities: You can invite entire groups to join communities. Instead of typing 50 names, you simply invite the "Sales Team" group.
• Events: You can invite entire groups to join events. For example, invite the entire "Product & Tech" department to the "Annual Hackathon."

 Targeted Communication (News, Newsletters & Hero teasers)

Stop blasting generic information to everyone. Groups allow you to target your communication channels to specific segments, reducing noise and increasing engagement.

• Multichannel Posts: You can target your news articles so they only appear in the timelines and trigger notifications in MS Teams for specific groups. For example, a "Tax Updates Reminder" is only sent to the LOC_Country_Germany group.
• Email Newsletters: You can curate specific newsletters for specific audiences, ensuring a "Weekly Wrap-up" is relevant to the reader's region or role.
• Hero Teasers: You can target individual slides within the hero teaser to specific groups. This allows you to mix "Global" slides (visible to everyone) with "Local" slides (visible only to the target group) in the same carousel.

 Personalized Branding (Themes)

You can move beyond a one-size-fits-all look by targeting the visual appearance of the platform itself. By assigning specific Themes to groups, you can change the colors, logos, and styling for different segments of your workforce.

If your organization is made up of multiple companies, you can ensure employees of "Acme Logistics" see their own blue branding and logo, while "Acme Retail" employees see their specific red branding, all within the same intranet.